The music and legacy of African American composer Florence Price will be celebrated Sunday, April 10, and Monday April 11, at BGSU’s College of Musical Arts.
The Florence Price Festival will begin with a lecture “Hear Her Voice: Knowing Florence Price, Pianist, Today,” by visiting scholar John Michael Cooper, Sunday at 6 p.m. in the Choral Rehearsal Room.
The talk will be followed at 7:30 p.m. by a recital of piano works by Price performed by students in Solungga Liu’s studio.
On Monday at 3:30 p.m. Cooper will present a colloquium to the musicology department, “With Love and Devotion to the Negro Race and Humanity…”: Margaret Bonds and the Social World of the Montgomery Variations. Bonds was a former student and friend of Price’s.
“This festival’s goal is to inform a larger audience of Price’s contributions to music, give many pianists in Dr. Liu’s studio the opportunity to learn and perform Price’s music for the first time, and to also introduce Price’s close friend, Margaret Bonds’ symphonic work, ‘The Montgomery Variations,’ and its social importance, to BGSU students,” According to Sandra Coursey, a pianist and doctoral student the College of Musical Arts.
The festival roots go back to November 2020, when released a recording of Three Roses for solo piano by Florence Price. After the release one of her former professors Erik Heine, who teaches music theory at Oklahoma City University, told her that his former musicology professor, was a Florence Price scholar.
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Cooper now teaches at Southwestern University in Texas.
According to Coursey he is dedicated to social justice. His website states: “Music is the key to understanding ourselves in all the diverse beauty and complexity of the human condition. And it is the key to making our world a better world.”
Coursey communicated with Cooper and that led to arranging his visit to BGSU as a guest scholar for the festival.
The festival came about as a collaboration between BGSU’s Music Teachers National Association, of which Coursey is the president, Dr. Solungga Liu’s piano studio, the BGSU Musicology Department, and the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music.
